StatCounter Integrates with Google Maps

StatCounter suprised its 1.3 million members when it rolled out a new “Visitor Map” feature. Visitors to a member’s website are now plotted as markers on a Google Map. This gives instant visual feedback about the location of visitors worldwide.

Each marker is expandable to give more information about when and how that particular visitor found a member’s website, what webpages they navigated through and how long they spent on the website. The ability to easily zoom in and out on the marker is also available.

MSN launches contextual Ads

Just a quick note for today: Microsoft launched contextual ads for beta publisher this morning. The new contextual ads will be  competition to Google Adsense and Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). Publishers seem to be very happy and it will be interesting to see if MSN contextual ads will pay out more than Google Adsense or YSM.

The service will include demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools.

Natal Mensez, product manager at MSN, just posted the following:

“Just want to emphasize that we’re inviting advertisers to participate in an early beta of Microsoft adCenter Content Ads — a new advertising product that will place relevant ads on web pages. Invitations will be rolling out to current adCenter customers over the next few weeks and months. We have plans to release a program for publishers in 2007… but this beta invitation is focused on the advertising platform.

When we have the URL up for advertisers to register interest in our Beta (should be up early next week)”

Monitor your competitors!

Current webanalytics tools measure your own website or measure the entire web (Coremetrics, Metricsdirect, Hitwise, Alexa…). When evaluating this data webanalysts often forget to monitor competitor behaviour. Monitoring and analyzing your competitors is one of the key factors for  your success. Website-watcher is a nice tool, which allows you to watch your competition closely. It takes a minimum of time and completes the picture of other monitoring techniques.  

Here the key features:

Monitor web pages
Monitor web pages with a minimum of time. Why waste hours surfing the web, when WebSite-Watcher can do this job for you within a few minutes. Supports all kind of pages with textual content (html, asp, php, …).
 

Monitor password protected pages
Logins to a password protected page can be recorded with the integrated Check-Macro feature. These macros are executed when WebSite-Watcher checks the bookmarks for updates.
 

Monitor forums
Efficient way to monitor forums for new topics and replies using forum templates. Works with all major forums including phpBB, SMF, vBulletin, IPB,

Monitor RSS-Feeds
Website-Watcher converts RSS/Atom feeds into a readable format using a template system. So you can use the full power of WebSite-Watcher to detect new or changed RSS postings within a single tool and also monitor password protected RSS feeds behind a login

Free Data mining class

Anand Rajaraman and Jeffrey D. Ullman ,both Stanford university professors,  taught a Data mining class last year.  They both are so kind to publish the slides and PDF files.

Introduction to Data Mining

Introduction to Web Mining

Improved Methods for Frequent-Pair Mining

Web Crawling

PageRank and Hubs/Authorities

Minhashing and Locality-Sensitive Hashing

Topic-Specific PageRank

Web Spam

Introduction to Stream Mining

Stream Mining, Estimating Frequencies

Extracting Relational Data from the Web

Virtual Databases  

Introduction to Clustering

More on Clustering

Optimizing Selection of Ads

Reach of webanalytic vendors

Week by week all the webanalytic vendors announce record results. Press releases don’t say much so I took the top 5 vendors and let them compete against each other. Here the results:

I. Alexa

 

II. Metricsmarket:

Omniture: Estimated 875,100 visitor sessions in the last 30 days

Websidestory: Estimated 539,800 visitor sessions in the last 30 days.

Coremetrics: Estimated 193,600 visitor sessions in the last 30 days.

Clicktracks: Estimated 722,000 visitor sessions in the last 30 days.

Webtrends: Estimated 678,200 visitor sessions in the last 30 days.

The numbers just give an idea and are not accurate, b/c these vendors work with different techniques. 

  

Web Analytics market to grow by 22% in 2006

The size of the UK market for Web Analytics will grow to £56 million by the end of 2006, a 22% rise from £46 million in 2005, according to research of E-consultancy.com

 According to leading vendors, 2006 is already proving to be a strong year of growth following a similarly successful 2005 which saw the market grow 25% year-on-year from £37 million to £46 million, according to our previous estimates.

E-consultancy analyst Linus Gregoriadis said: “The web analytics industry is thriving because companies increasingly realise that accurate measurement and meaningful analysis is an essential platform for a successful online business.”

The arrival of Google’s free analytics service on the scene has been a positive development for the industry because it has helped to open up the marketplace and speed up the process whereby analytics is seen as essential business decision-making tool.

E-consultancy editor Chris Lake added: “Far from posing a threat to other web analytics vendors, the launch of Google Analytics has given impetus to the sector by opening the eyes of many organisations to the benefits of best practice in this area.”

Webanalytics professional Salary

After receiving a few emails with questions about the salaries of webanalytics professionals, I decided to do some research. I collected data from job offers and a resume database. Feel free to add your salary in the comments.

Here the results:

Level	State	Job description	Salary in $
Temporary	Texas	Webanalyst for SAS	USD 45.00 to USD 65.00 per hour
Experienced	California	Implementation engineer	80k plus stocks
Experienced	New York	Webmeasurment specialist	80-90k
Experienced	New York	Webanalyst	90-110k
Experienced	Dublin / Ireland	Web analytics -Senior devloper	60-100k
Mid-level	Ontario / Canada	Online Operations Manager	70k
Experienced	California	Web Analyst	90k
Experienced	New York	Web Operations Analyst	75k
Experienced	Massachusetts	eCommerce Analyst	80k plus stocks
Experienced	California	Senior Marketing Executive	110k
Experienced	Texas	VP Interactive Marketing Services	100k
Experienced	Ohio	Interactive Director	75k
Experienced	Richmond	Implementations Engineer	110k
Experienced	Oklahoma	Marketing Communications Project Manager	75k
Experienced	California	Online Marketing Director	95k
Experienced	California	Web Analyst	75k
Experienced	Illinois	Internet Marketing Manager	70k
Mid-level	Texas	Webanalyst	75k
Experienced	Virginia	Systems Analyst, Business Analyst	85k
Experienced	California	Dir/VP of Product Development	120k
Mid-level	California	Webadministrator	55k
Experienced	New Jersey	eCommerce Director	110k
Experienced	Indiana	Manager Internet marketing	50k
Experienced	California	Director – Business Intelligence	180k
Experienced	New York	Online Marketing Manager	80k
Experienced	California	Sr. Business Analyst	100k
Experienced	New York	Interactive Analyst	65k
Experienced	Florida	BI Manager	125k
Experienced	California	Market Intelligence Manager	110k
Mid-level	Wisconsin	Marketing Manager	45k
Experienced	Colorado	Senior Web Analytics Analyst	90k
Experienced	London, UK	Business Analyst	70k
Experienced	Conneticut	Web/CRM Analyst	80k
Experienced	Virginia	Project Manager	60k
Experienced	California	Senior Manager Internet Properties	100k
Experienced	California	Marketing Manager	65k
Experienced	California	VP of marketing	110k
Experienced	Massachusetts	Business Analyst	65k
Experienced	New York	Interactive Director Marketing	85k
Experienced	MD	Manager, Web Analytics	95k
Experienced	California	Sr. Marketing Manager	70k
Experienced	Massachusetts	Marketing Analytics	80k
Experienced	California	Online Media Director	90k
Experienced	Conneticut	Statistical Marketing Manager	78k
Experienced	California	Web Strategies & Operations Director	140k
Experienced	California	Online Marketing Manager	80k

Email marketing – 10 things you should know

Yesterday I took part in the Email marketing class with Dr. Wilson. I already knew most of the stuff, but still learned some details that I wasn’t aware of.

 Here my (personal) notes:

 1. Getting [newsletter] subscribers top priority

Newsletter marketing can be powerful and shouldn’t be the websites “step-child”.  Your house-list is gold if you can build it aggressively.

2.  Use layer pop-ups

Dr. Wilsons newsletter subscriber rate increased 40%. His secrets: Show the popup after 5 seconds and make clear that it is a popup from the website. Give incentives (free e-book/ whitepaper). Make sure popup is not on your Adwords landing page (TOS), Popups for newsletters are annoying but very effective, only one popup per visitor (cookie)

3. Use hosted ASP Email marketing solution

Best for deliverability, b/c ASP solutions keep strong relationship with ISP. Licensed or desktop solution have delivery caps or deliverability is you own solution. Dr. Wilson recommended Pipersoftware.com, returnpath.biz, edeliverability.com or deliverymontor.com

4. Format Multi-part Mime

A sandwich of text then HTML, don’t use pure text or html (deliverability).

5. Graphics and Design

Use large fonts for old eyes; don’t use pictures for important messages, b/c graphics may not be seen in preview panel (e.g. gmail)

6. Archive newsletter on page

Good for SEO

7. Don’t overuse personalization

Balance of personal and general.

8. Remember autoresponders

Autorespond to the 2% of the users to get 100% permission (if possible)

9. Spam filters / Test

Be always updated of spam keywords (e.g. free, cialis…) , whitelists, check newsletter before sending: 

sales-spamcheck@sitesell.net?subject=TEST , Can Spam Act, Address and phonenumber in the email,

10. Use absolute paths

Use http://, check everything twice.

Clicktracks sold for more than $10 million

Web Analytics firm ClickTracks Analytics Inc. announced plans to join Lyris Technologies, EmailLabs and Hot Banana as subsidiaries of marketing technology provider J.L. Halsey

Market and Product Acceleration Planned

Halsey will contribute to the acceleration of ClickTracks product development, marketing, sales and support capabilities. “ClickTracks is one of the fastest growing web analytics companies serving the SMB market.” said David Burt, CEO of J.L. Halsey. “We look forward to seeing additional innovative ClickTracks products on the market – more quickly and well integrated with other vital online marketing tools.”

“ClickTracks growth has been entirely organic for the past four years,” ClickTracks CEO John Marshall pointed out. “Being a part of J.L. Halsey now opens up a significant opportunity for ClickTracks to serve a larger customer base with expanded support, new integrations and quicker time to market with our upcoming features and products.”

Integration Plans

ClickTracks web analytics is a key part of a set of integrated products that include email marketing and web content management for small and mid-sized businesses. While maintaining current integrations, ClickTracks has mapped out seamless integrations for analysis of email campaign results, AB split testing, and web site changes throughout the new family of products over the next 12 to 18 months.

Structure

ClickTracks will operate as an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of J.L. Halsey and will continue to invest in R&D, sales and marketing and enhance their award-winning technologies. John Marshall will continue as ClickTracks CEO and no restructuring actions are planned for the company.

Great success for John and his team. Their strategy was always very smart.

Appexchange soon available to Salesforce customers

Besides Sitecatalyst from Omniture Salesforce will soon launch Appexchange for Google Adwords. Appexchange for Google AdWords adds search engine marketing to salesforce.com’s suite of on-demand business services, making it possible for companies to create, manage, and measure search engine marketing campaigns.

Key Features:

Create and Manage Ads – Manage your Google Search Campaigns from Salesforce
Track Inbound Leads – Quickly and clearly correlate search efforts with inbound leads
Measure ROI – Directly compare sales revenue with search marketing cost

If you are interested in this tool, have a look at the Appexchange presentation. Salesforce customers can try the application for free for 30 days; the cost is $300/month after that.